What did we need of lectures and books?
I had the syllabus of your body
The blackboard of your skin.
You contained everything I wanted to know.
From you, the periodic table of the heart
and the mysterious language of love.
From you, the formula to calculate
distance and longing, volume and force.
You were a canon of experience
an encyclopedia of the unknown.
All night, I studied you.
By day, we slept and dreamt,
Wrote papers of our connection
Typed a universe with our hands.
This poem won a 2012 silver award from the Maryland Writers Association.
Used with the author's permission.
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